There’s a lot to say about it and I’m still processing. But one of the things that fascinated me about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference was how persuasive is the feeling that you're making progress. The language is always changing and so you're Always Learning. The frontiers of identity are always expanding. Everything can always be made more 'inclusive.' Techniques can always be refined.
It's easy to lose sight of what you're progressing toward: sterilizing more kids, earlier, on thinner and thinner pretexts, regardless of comorbidities, despite mounting evidence of both social contagion as a driver and medical harm as the outcome.
Just a few short years ago, surgeons didn't know how to deal with underdeveloped penile tissue in "affirmed AMAB individuals with early puberty blockade" but now we know how to 'quilt' a fake vagina out of colon and scrotal tissue and other donor sites.
A few years ago, the scales we used to justify experimental medical interventions on teens were so binary but now we have special genderqueer scales that let teens rank how many body parts (out of a possible 33) they want to surgically alter!
Some clinicians once felt very uncomfortable performing 'gender nullification' surgeries (cutting everything off) but then they Did The Work and now they're treating more patients than ever!
...
The further you go—the more patients you cut up, the more critics you silence—the harder it is to see your destination clearly. But it must be beautiful and just because you've sacrificed for it and identified yourself with it and you are a Good Person.
The entire conference spoke to this Good Person. You are a good person because you are overcoming your biases. You are a good person because you oppose the bad people (even if you don't understand them and we won't talk about them because that would be like letting them win).
You are a good person because you get it. You aren't one of those reactionaries who balks at hysterectomies for troubled teen girls. You affirm that this is life-saving, gender-affirming care. Any good doctor would provide it. You don't feel the horror anymore.
1 comment:
What a nightmare. There should be Nuremberg trials for these tools some day. What kind of occult-minded moral coward -- or sadist? -- do you have to be to mutilate teenagers on a basis such as the "fluidity" of "sexual identity"?
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